| Interview: Interview with Hal Duncan, Part II |
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Page 1 of 4 Interview with Hal Duncan, Part IIPosted by Dylanfanatic (8/20/2006 2:24:33 PM) In reading Vellum, I was struck with the sense that at times, this was a very personal book. Which scenes would you say stood out the most to you in an emotional sense as you wrote them? In some respects the most personal and the most emotional scenes are two different things. Although, as I said, there's a fair amount of personal experience underlying the inner narrative of Jack Flash, his childhood in the schemes, I deliberately kept a certain detachment there, and sort of placed it all in inverted commas as an unreliable narrative. As much as I think fiction should be written in blood, sweat and tears autobiography, especially of the miserable-childhood sort, is just tedious and self-absorbed. That stuff is partly there to be stomped on. The really important scenes, the ones that meant the most emotionally to me in writing, were those scenes in the faerie chapter where I parallel the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard with the murder of Puck. I was actually trying to absent myself from the writing there as much as possible, to put as little of me as possible into the story, to let the event speak for itself without any cheap sentimentalism. I suppose it's still quite personal, because the narrator at that point, Jack, his grief and rage are sort of expressed by the very fact that they're not expressed, if that makes sense -- and this is the form of grief I remember from my brother's death. A total lock-down of affect. A heart like a clenched fist. A sorrow and fury so fucking intense that any voicing of it would be so... banal as to be an insult. I still remember that feeling and, with that scene describing, basically, the murder of Matthew Shepard in all its cold brutality, well, that scene was written straight from the heart. The image in the Errata which follows that chapter, the self-mutilated Jack -- that's that grief let out. The other scene that stood out most, and it's probably the scene I'm proudest of in the book, is one of those with Seamus Finnan. There's a few of the Seamus scenes that really mean a lot to me actually, because the soldiers of WW1, the Red Clydesiders, the International Brigades, with all of those I was deeply moved by the stories of the individuals I came across in my research, so when I came to write these sections I couldn't help but think of the reality underneath the fiction; but there it's as much the truth that makes it emotional as the fiction, so it's the scene where Seamus tells Anna the Prometheus story that really stands out for me. That's the thematic core of the book. That's my humanism in a nutshell. |
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